The term over-engineered is often misused. The best hypothetical example we can give is if Toyota built a base-model Camry that could accelerate to 60 mph in three seconds and cruise at 200 mph on the freeway. That would be way over-engineered for purpose. What people usually mean when talking about over-engineered cars are cars that are incredibly reliable. However, once in a while, an automaker has blown the budget and built something well beyond purpose.
The rule of thumb here is that an over-engineered car was money unnecessarily spent on the engineering, more often than not resulting in an iconic car.
Lexus LFA
When Lexus decided to show the world exactly what it could do when it went nuts on engineering, it came up with the masterpiece that is the Lexus LFA. It was a limited-production two-door coupe with a 4.8-liter V10 engine built by Yamaha housed in a carbon-fiber reinforced polymer chassis with aluminum front and rear subframes. Its performance was cutting edge, but the beauty is in the details.
Yamaha built the V10 then studiously tuned the sound as well as the performance, but Lexus extended development time when it threw away the aluminum chassis developed over six years, including time spent on the Nürburgring, and decided to create a carbon fiber tub in the name of power-to-weight ratio. It was a critical smash, but the 500 units didn’t sell fast and Lexus likely didn’t make anywhere near all its money back.
Despite going into production in 2010, there were still four for sale on dealer lots in America in 2010. It’s only in recent years that the LFA has finally found the respect it deserves, and now you can expect to pay between $800k to $1.5 million for one.
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Volkswagen Phaeton
All we really need to tell you here is that the Pheaton is a Volkswagen, built on the platform designed for the Bentley Continental GT and Flying Spur models. The Phaeton is an absurd car in many ways. Volkswagen translates as People’s Car, but the CEO of Volkswagen, Ferdinand Piëch, wanted a car that surpassed premium BMW and Mercedes cars out of revenge for the two brands releasing the A-Class and BMW 3 Series Compact to directly compete with Volkswagen models. Volkswagen already owned Audi in the early 2000s.
In terms of absurdness for a Volkswagen model, it was available with some sensible engines as well as Audi’s V10 turbocharged diesel and Bentley’s famous W12, albeit without turbos strapped to it. It was hand-assembled in an eco-friendly factory with a glass exterior and the bodywork had to be transferred by special road transport vehicles over 60 miles from the Volkswagen plant at Zwickau.
It started at $66,700 but the W12 version sold for $101,300 in 2006 – which would be around $163,000 now. For a Volkswagen.
Lexus LS 400
The Lexus LS 400 was over-engineered by design, so, philosophically speaking, you can argue it shouldn’t be here. However, it is Lexus’ first foray into the premium market to compete directly with Audi, BMW, and Mercedes. It was developed without specific budget or time constraints, which, upon reflection, is an insane thing for an automaker to do. However, at the end of the 1980s, the Japanese auto industry was flush with cash. It took 60 designers and 1,400 engineers in 24 teams, and 2,300 technicians logging over 1.6 million miles of testing to bring the LS 400 to market. And, over a billion dollars, which adjusted for inflation, is, well, an ungodly amount.
The result was a car that changed the game for premium vehicles and full of innovation to achieve a smooth, quiet drive, including fluid-damped interior fixtures and sandwich steel body panels. In 1990, the LS sold for $35,000 (just under $90,000 today), which prompted BMW to accuse Lexus of selling it under cost. Which it likely was. The LS 400 likely never made any money for Lexus on its own, but it cemented the brand as a contender despite having no name recognition.
In that regard, it was time and money incredibly well spent.
Mercedes-Benz W123
Between 1976 and 1985, Mercedes models were still built to specification, not to price. The executive’s demands were for cars to be robust, reliable, and utilitarian mixed with some luxury and class. For the W123 and the W124 generation of Mercedes-Benz cars, the result was something that took so long to build that the used market dealt with them at vastly inflated prices. And, something that was hard to kill with time and miles on the clock.
However, the two Dr. Ferdinand Piëch-developed diesel engines are considered some of the most reliable engines ever built. The 2.4-liter diesel is best known, and its reliability is demonstrated by a Greek taxi driver who donated his car to the Mercedes museum with 2.9 million miles on the odometer. The fact that a Mercedes model is as renowned as Ford’s Crown Victoria as a commercial taxi vehicle is testament to how overbuilt it was for purpose.
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991 & 992 Porsche 911 Targa
Targa top cars largely went away because they stopped making sense when modern convertibles became easier to make and more rigid than they used to be while meeting safety standards. They only existed in the first place because it looked for a while like the US might outlaw convertibles in the 1960s. Now, though, a convertible you get an actual open-top experience rather than a glorified sunroof so they aren’t in demand. That doesn’t stop Porsche from occasionally resurrecting the idea, though, and for the 991 and now the 992 generation, it appointed engineers to create a roof piece that folds itself away.
The Targa’s mechanism to fold away the roof is brilliantly engineered across both generations, despite the complete lack of necessity or customer desire. It seems to be a version of the modern 911 that Porsche designed just because it could. Even the top of the B pillar moves up and down to allow the folding mechanism to pass through the roll bar to get to the trunk. However, it’s heavier than a cabriolet, wind noise is louder, and it takes a full 20 seconds at a full stop to fold the roof away. The 992’s version, well, you can see in the video above how much effort it took to put away the top section of the roof, and it’s absolutely beautifully and smoothly done.
However, a cabriolet does the job perfectly well and without needing all that glass.
Toyota Supra MK IV
The MK IV Toyota Supra was a failure for Toyota. It was designed in the 1990s as a grand touring sports car to compete with cars like the Nissan Skyline GTR, Mazda RX- 7, Chevrolet Corvette, and so on. It was available in the US from 1994 to 1998, then disappeared until the 2019 reboot. The reason it’s still talked about is because of the twin-turbo, six-cylinder 2JZ engine that made 276 horsepower from the factory in its final form, but could be boosted, without modifying the engine’s internals, to 500 horsepower. Nobody can name another engine from the 1990s that could take that kind of abuse and still be reliable.
If that isn’t over-engineered enough for you, it was a relatively simple car but had an F1-inspired four-sensor four-channel track-tuned anti-lock braking system with yaw control. Each caliper had a sensor and could be controlled according to speed, angle, and pitch. The result was a 70 mph to zero stopping distance of 149 feet, measured by Car And Driver in 1997.
The feat wasn’t topped until 2004 by the Porsche Carrera GT – a $440,000 supercar. The 2JZ Supra cost around $60,000 new.
Acura Vigor
This is one you may never have heard of, and was a product of the insane Japanese economy bubble that left Lexus with enough money to build the LS 400. Acura, however, went a different and rather weird way. There’s a plethora of bubble economy cars out there designed for design’s sake, but Honda/Acura designed and built an inline five-cylinder engine, just so the Vigor would sit in the middle of the Acura brand lineup of the entry-level Integra’s four-cylinder engine and the top-tier Legend’s six-cylinder engine.
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Acura was so determined to fit the five-cylinder engine in the Vigor that it had to be mounted longitudinally and installed at a 35-degree slant. It also had to be front-wheel-drive, so the transmission had to be engineered to send power forward, then back through the bellhousing it came from. This created a new problem that, and strap in for this, needed an intermediate drive shaft from the differential to the right front wheel to go through the crankcase to solve.
Conclusion: If You Want An Over-Engineered Car Now, Buy An Early 1990s Japanese Car
As we said at the beginning, over-engineering a car requires money, and the Japanese economic bubble gave automakers more money than they could spend. It resulted in the game-changing Lexus LS 400, but it also resulted in some ridiculous cars we’ll likely get into. It also resulted in Honda’s 1990’s engines in their economy cars, which, like the Supra’s 2JZ engine, could absorb a huge amount of power. Honda’s D series engine, for example, came with forged crank shafts and rods – totally unnecessary for cars making 120–140 horsepower, but also why they could be relatively easily modified with pistons, head studs, a larger camshaft, and a whopping great turbo to make 500 horsepower and rev out over 8,000 rpm without exploding.
